February 2017

February was a lively month at the Center as our research fellows continued their work, we held apublic lecture, and continued our outreach on the USC campus and beyond.

The Center’s inaugural Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, Teresa Walch (PhD Candidate atUC San Diego), concluded her stay by giving a compelling public lecture on the exclusion of GermanJews from their own homeland during the Holocaust. The Center’s Greenberg Research Fellow,Katja Schatte (PhD Candidate at University of Washington), began her residency at the Center thismonth. While at the Center she will be watching testimony related to her dissertation project, whichfocuses on the relationship between second and third generations of East German Jews. Inparticular, she addresses scholarly and community debates about contemporary and East GermanJewish identity, Holocaust memory, and the effects of trauma and exile across generations. 

Additionally, the Center hosted a lecture by Lee Ann Fujii on violent displays and resistance, withexamples drawn from Bosnia, Croatia, and the Jim Crow era in the U.S. (Read more about thismonth’s events and the work of our fellows below.) 

This month, Center staff assisted USC faculty members from the departments of Psychology,Anthropology, Political Science, and History to introduce their undergraduate students to the VisualHistory Archive (VHA). Center staff also organized workshops that will be held on the East Coastnext month, which will be led by Center staff, on the value and use of the VHA in research andteaching.

As we move into March, we are eagerly anticipating Katja Schatte’s upcoming lecture and the arrivalof the 2016-2017 Center Research Fellow, Alexander Korb, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.

Sincerely, 

Wolf Gruner

Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide ResearchProfessor of History and Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies

Events

“Excluding Jews from their Homelandand Erasing ‘Jewish Spaces’ in NaziGermany"

A Lecture by Teresa Walch, InauguralKatz Research FellowBefore ending her residency Teresa Walch, the 2016-2017 Inaugural Robert J. Katz Research Fellow inGenocide Studies, gave a lecture on the calculatedand gradual exclusion of Jews from public spacesand ultimately from their own homes that began in the 1930s. This research is part of her widerdissertation research on the crucial role space played in the Nazis’ rise to and consolidation of poweras Nazis sought to redesign space to fit their ideological visions.

Watch the lecture and read a more detailed summary of her talk here.

“Everyday Forms of Resistance: Evidence From theKilling Fields of Bosnia, Rwanda, and the UnitedStates"

A Lecture by Lee Ann Fujii, University of Toronto 

Professor Lee Ann Fujii visited the Center this month and gave a publiclecture about her new book and acts of resistance related to herresearch. In her lecture,  she drew on multiple disciplines, literatures,and episodes of violence and genocide to analyze the execution of individuals in performative ways, infront of crowds, with other kinds of violence and humiliation displayed besides only the killing. Sheoffered a new analytic category to encompass these kinds of acts – violent display.

Read a more detailed summary here.

Research

Katja Schatte, Greenberg ResearchFellow 2016-2017Katja Schatte, PhD candidate in East German JewishHistory at the University of Washington andrecipient of the USC Shoah Foundation Center forAdvanced Genocide Research’s Margee and Douglas

Greenberg Research Fellowship, arrived to begin hermonth-long residency at the Center. During herresidency, she is viewing and analyzing testimoniesrelevant to her dissertation in progress, entitled“’Don’t We All Have a Responsibility in This World?’Jewish Women’s Lives and Identities in East Berlin,1945-1990”. Her research focuses on the experiencesof female Holocaust survivors, memory, post-memory and transgenerational trauma. Thetestimonies in the VHA will complement her owninterviews conducted with Jewish women who wereraised in East Germany after World War II.

Read more about Katja here and watch an interview with her here.

Shira Klein, International Teaching Fellow2016-2017Shira Klein, assistant professor of History at ChapmanUniversity, is the 2016-2017 International TeachingFellow. She earned the fellowship by proposing tointegrate testimonies from the Visual History Archiveinto two classes she teaches at Chapman University: anexisting undergraduate course “Jewish Life fromNapoleon to Hitler” and a new graduate course “JewishMigration and War.” While she has had students watchtestimonies in the Visual History Archive in herundergraduate course for the last five years, she willnow be assigning them research projects centered onthe VHA. 

Professor Klein recently visited the Center to meet and collaborate with staff. During the in-depthconsultation on her visit, she made a discovery that she said will vastly improve their experiencesearching the archive: how to best navigate and use the Visual History Archive’s Index Search to helpstudents discover topics that interest them. Klein also found testimonies that will inform her ownresearch about Italian Jews during the Holocaust. 

As part of her research, Klein seeks to dispel the popular myth that Italians were benevolent towardtheir Jewish neighbors. Klein argues, along with other scholars, that Italians did indeed cooperatewith the Nazis to help round up Jews – and she has found testimonies in the Visual History Archivethat support her theory. 

Read more about Shira Klein here.

Applications for the 2017-2018 International Teaching Fellow are currently being accepted. For moreinformation, click here. 

Interdisciplinary Research Week

Each year, the Center hosts a team of scholars fromdifferent disciplines and different universities for oneweek to brainstorm a project that uses thetestimonies from the Visual History Archive. Thisopportunity is awarded to an interdisciplinary groupof scholars preferably from different countries whowish to use the Visual History Archive as a centralaspect of an innovative research project in the field ofgenocide studies. The next recipients of the annual Interdisciplinary Research Week fellowship havebeen selected. The team brings a a group of seven scholars from four Latin American countries to LosAngeles that will develop a project examining testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled inMexico, Argentina, Chile and Colombia. They plan to use a variety of research methods to combthrough the 54,000 testimonies in the VHA, including text mining, mapping trajectories of survival,and using indexing terms to gather a representative sample of the diversity of the survivors’experiences. They are interested not only in what the survivors say, but also in how they tell theirstories, including what is difficult for them to talk about, what they say spontaneously, and how theyrespond to the interviewers.

Read more about their project here. 

Visual History Archive Informs Scholarly Books and Articles in 2016To learn more about some of the scholarship informed by the Visual History Archive in 2016, clickhere.

OutreachDuring the month of February, Center staff had the opportunity to provide introductions to the VisualHistory Archive and to assist USC faculty from Psychology, Anthropology, Political Science, andHistory in incorporating testimonies from the VHA into their courses. The topics for these classeswere: Psychological Adjustment Among Survivors of Genocide; Cultures of Genocide; Human Rights;and Race and Religious Riots in Modern World History. Students received an introduction to thehistory of the Shoah Foundation, as well as demonstrations on how to search the Visual HistoryArchive for their class or student research projects. The Center also organized travel for next month toKeene State, Northeastern, and the University of Pennsylvania. Center staff will provide workshops tofaculty, students, and staff at these universities about the uses of the VHA for teaching and research.

Upcoming EventsMarch 7, 2017

Katja Schatte’s lecture: “Between Scholarship and Community Engagement: Exploring Pre- and Post-Reunification Jewish Life in East Berlin”

March 8, 2017

Bogdan’s Journey (Film Screening), 7:00pm, Laemmle Music Hall 3

April 4, 2017

Save the date for an event featuring the 2016 Center’s USC Summer research fellows.

May 8, 2017

Save the date for a lecture by 2016-2107 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar Omer Bartov.

Opportunities

Call for Applications 

Third Workshop for Advanced PhD Candidates from North AmericanUniversities and Israel who are working on the Holocaust:

Due March 15th, 2017Yad Vashem’s International Research Institute and the USC Shoah Foundation Center for AdvancedGenocide Research encourage PhD candidates from the United States, Canada, and Israel to submittheir applications for this joint workshop that will bring together graduate students to present theirdissertation projects on the Holocaust, including its antecedents and aftermath, to exchange ideas,conduct research in the Yad Vashem Archives. The workshop will take place from 25-29 June 2017 atYad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, Israel. All topics on theHolocaust and proposals from all disciplines are open for consideration.

For more details, click here. 

International Teaching Fellowship 2017-2018

Due March 31, 2017The International Teaching Fellowship provides support for university and college faculty to integratetestimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) into new or existingcourses. The fellowship is open to all disciplinary and methodological approaches. It is available tofaculty at universities and colleges worldwide that subscribe to the USC Shoah Foundation VisualHistory Archive.

For more details, click here. 

In addition, click below to read about opportunities for specific university teaching fellowships at:

Texas A&M University (A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation Teaching Fellow Program)

University of Pennsylvania (Rutman Fellowship for Research and Teaching)

  

USC Graduate/Faculty Summer Research Fellowships 2017

Due March 31, 2017The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals fromUSC faculty members and graduate students for its Summer 2017 Research Fellowships. The

fellowships provide $3,000 support for USC faculty and USC graduate students doing researchfocused on the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and/or other unique USC resourcesand collections during the summer of 2017. The fellowship is open to USC faculty and USC graduatestudents of all disciplines. A limited number of fellowships are available. Award decisions for thisfellowship will be based on the originality of the research proposal and the centrality of USC ShoahFoundation Visual History Archive and/or other relevant USC resources to the research project.

For more details, click here.

 

DEFY Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowships 2017

Due March 31, 2017The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals fromUSC undergraduate students for its 2017 DEFY Summer Research Fellowships. The fellowshipsprovide $1,000 support for USC undergraduates doing research focused on the testimonies of theUSC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and/or other related USC resources and collectionsduring the summer of 2017. The fellowship is open to USC undergraduate students of all disciplines. Alimited number of fellowships are available. Award decisions for the DEFY fellowships will be basedon the originality of the research proposal and the centrality of USC resources to the research project.

For more information, click here.

Donate to Special Collections Please consider donating private papers, documents, photographs or films regarding the Holocaustand other genocides. The Center works with USC Libraries Special Collections to preserve privatecollections and make them accessible for academic research worldwide and student investigation atUSC. 

To find out more about donating materials, email us at cagr@usc.edu or call 213-740-6001.

For more information about the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced GenocideResearch and its work, please visit our website at: cagr.usc.edu 

To subscribe to the Center's mailing list, click here.

©2016 USC Shoah Foundation

University of Southern California

Leavey Library

650 West 35th Street, Suite 114

Los Angeles, CA 90089

213-740-6001 

cagr@usc.edu

Share this email:

Manage your preferences | Opt out using TrueRemove™ Got this as a forward? Sign up to receive our future emails. View this email online.

650 West 35th Street LVL 114 Los Angeles, CA | 90089 US

This email was sent to cagr@usc.edu. To continue receiving our emails, add us to your address book.